The market for lemons

My girlfriend wants to buy a second-hand car. I think it's a good idea. If and when we do so, it will be the first car that either of us will have owned. Neither of us is a car expert; we are the type whose normal conversations tend to drift onto the politics of the everyday rather than the art of motorcycle maintenance, so to speak (to mix pop culture, academic references, and figures of speech). So how will we be able to tell a good car from a lemon?

Akerlof (1970) and a great many economists since - including one of my first year seminar tutors for undergraduate economics - would doubtless warn us of a great many potential hazards in the endeavour on which we are about to embark.

Fortunately, one of the assumptions behind Akerlof's work does not obtain. My girlfriend is not homo economicus. She's an Indian. She is not going to buy her car from a used-car salesperson. She is going to call one of her Indian friends in the UK, who will perhaps call some other Indians, and put her in touch with an Indian who wants to sell a car. The seller will be a known quantity.

My girlfriend is not stupid; this course of action is obvious to her. Who would do otherwise? In this context, the market is for lemons.

References:
Akerlof, George A. (1970) "The market for 'lemons': quality uncertainty and the market mechanism" Quarterly Journal of Economics 84 (3) 488-500